Human resource (HR) management constitutes a vital part of every business. Yet, HR has traditionally been a highly manual departmental operation. These manual tasks are mostly monotonous and prone to errors. With the advances in AI and automation technologies, HR functions can increase their level of automation and the processes can be handled more efficiently improving employee satisfaction.  Gartner shares that  17% of organizations use AI-based solutions in their HR function and another 30% will do the same in 2022.

HR automation is the process of increasing the productivity of HR departments by saving them from tiresome manual tasks and enabling them to concentrate on higher value-added tasks such as decision-making and strategy. By automating repetitive tasks, HR management professionals can capture, create, and update data and streamline various HR tasks for employees. This will help businesses to be more productive, rules-driven, and streamlined.  According to Gartner, there are three main challenges for companies to implement AI and automation powered solutions in their HR processes. 

1. Funding AI initiatives 

2. Security and privacy concerns

3. The complexity of integrating AI into existing in-house infrastructures 

There are many automated HR systems available on the market today. When investigating a suitable system, you should ask for a demo of the software and its features.  To check if a solution is suitable for your company’s HR processes, you should have answers to the following questions: 

1. Does this solution satisfy all my needs?   

2. What systems does the solution integrate with and how easy is it to integrate 

3. Is your solution scalable? 

So the question is, how can your business tap into the power of HR process automation? Why with Gusto Chatbot, of course!  

Gusto Chatbot is a platform for scaling your HR support with AI-based self-service automation. Delivering remote support for employees is more important than ever and this chatbot can help automate employee support with intelligent chatbot and process automation, out-of-the-box.

Gusto Chatbot can be added to any of your instant messaging apps like Slack or Microsoft Teams so that employees can self-serve their HR queries, on-the-go, anytime.

Gusto chatbots use Natural Language Processing to understand a user’s intention or utterances for initiating a conversation with it as well as to extract required data from a user’s query and pass it to the automation to resolve the user’s issue in real-time. So, think of how intelligent chatbots work, but with the Gusto chatbot, it can not only have those benefits, but also extend the functionalities of the Gusto tool using advanced integration and workflows. 

Gusto's chatbot is a computer software that simulates human communication. Users talk with these technologies using a chat interface or by voice, exactly as they would with another person. Chatbots understand the words spoken to them and respond with a pre-programmed response.

Chatbots, like ordinary apps, contain application layers, databases, conversational user interfaces (CUIs), and application programming interfaces (APIs). There are three types of chatbots accessible today:

Rule-based chatbots:The most basic option, these bots merely respond to extremely precise inquiries with a pre-defined response. These bots are ideal for tasks such as lead qualification or providing clients with an engaging FAQ experience.

Intelligent chatbots:These intelligent bots learn from the user's requests and information using machine learning, or "ML." Intellectual bots are taught to recognise certain words and phrases that prompt a response. They gradually train themselves to comprehend more queries and provide better replies.

AI-powered chatbots:These bots tackle user issues by combining the advantages of rule-based bots with the strength of cognitively autonomous programmes. They can recall conversational context and comprehend user preferences. To comprehend clients, these bots utilize a mix of natural language processing, machine learning, and AI. Natural language processing improves the naturalness of human-computer interactions.

By using Gusto Chatbot, you streamline your workplace HR support to connect employees, processes, and automations into a transparent workflow. Let’s take a look at some of the automations you get with Gusto Chatbot

• Employee Onboarding

• Leave Management

• Track Employee Time Offs

• Keep employees on the loop about their payroll 

Here are some of the  Gusto Chatbot tasks that Workativ can take care of for you.   

1. Gusto Employee Onboarding

Onboarding includes substantial paperwork, signing contracts, completing benefits paperwork, and other required duties. The processing time for all the different documents needed can be reduced to a few hours rather than a week with Workativ’s Gusto process automation. HR personnel will just have to provide Workativ with the required details about the new employee on their Slack or Teams and Workativ easily adds them to Gusto. This helps to ensure that newly recruited workers receive the appropriate equipment and system access grants promptly.  

2. Leave Management 

Manually calculating and approving leave requests is difficult, as the HR department must review the balance of leave, receive the approval of the manager, and record the leave for payroll calculation. This time-consuming procedure also makes it difficult for the HR management and staff to accept the leave requests on time.

With Workativ’s automated Gusto leave approval systems, HR automation of leave management can help secure approvals quicker while also enabling employees’ leave records to be updated instantly. This will help companies monitor, handle, and authorize employee leaves much more efficiently.  

Workativ  and Gusto: The Perfect Team to Automate Employee Onboarding and Offboarding 

Not only can you automate Gusto tasks with Workativ, but you can also combine Gusto tasks with other app tasks into one single effective automation via Gusto integrations. Let’s take a look at some of them.  

1. Efficient Onboarding/Offboarding 

You can set up an automation with Workativ after connecting your Gusto, Office 365, and Slack account such that a new employee gets added to the company’s Office 365 email distribution list after Workativ retrieves the employees’ email from Gusto and then a message is sent to the company’s  Slack channel by Workativ about the new employee. And when an employee gets terminated, help desk agents can use Workativ to create a ticket on tools like Jira Service Desk so that the employee experiences a smooth offboarding experience.

2. Track Employee Time Offs 

With Workativ’s Gusto automation, time off approvals becomes simpler with Gusto. On their Slack or Microsoft Teams chat, any employee can simply use Workativ on their mobile phone to request time off.

A notification is sent immediately to the manager for approval via email and everything is entered in Gusto automatically by Workativ. The employee then receives a confirmation from Workativ on their Slack or Microsoft Teams chat as soon as the manager responds to the leave request. Simple, right?  

3. Keep employees on the loop about their payroll 

By integrating Workativ with Gusto, you can set up an automation that enables employees to view their salary details with ease. While calculating payroll for employees, HR personnel can also easily view employee details on Workativ like the number of leaves taken by the employee, etc., This makes the payroll calculation process much faster and error-free. 

Now that we’ve seen the endless possibilities of what integrating Workativ and Gusto and your existing apps can do for you, let’s see how you can go about the same.

Step 1. Creating a bot workspace

When you sign up for Workativ Assistant, you’ll be required to name your workspace. You can provide the name of  your organization as a workspace name.    

Step 2. Download your bot

Download a prebuilt Gusto bot from the bot Marketplace    

So that’s all there is to the initial set up of your workspace. Next, let’s download Gusto workflows

Step 3. Setting up a Gusto app workflow 

Lets download Gusto app workflow from marketplace   

Click on Download from Marketplace  

Select the Gusto application   

Select the app workflow  

Connect with your Gusto account    

Test the app workflow   

Step 4: Now add workflow to the Gusto chatbot 

Add app workflow to the dialog conversation  

Select the workflow  

Provide the inputs & save it   

Test your Gusto chatbot    

Step 5: Deploy Gusto chatbot in your favourite chat channel   

Now the benefits are enormous when it comes to integrating and automating Gusto tasks with Workativ. 

1. Streamlined efficient processes 

With Workativ’s Gusto process automation, HR processes become much simpler and transparent. HR personnel can onboard/offboard employees in a jiff, employees can request and get approval for time offs in an instant, and HR personnel can view details about an employee on-the-go using Workativ on their Slack or Microsoft Teams via Workativ’s Gusto Slack integration. 

2. Effective records management 

Instead of having to log in to a static portal every time to apply for time offs, employees can easily bring up Workativ on their mobile phone or laptop/desktop and ask  Workativ to apply for  time off.  Workativ sends out approval requests to managers and once approved, informs the employee about the same. Workativ then records the time off on Gusto. HR personnel can use Workativ to view time offs of an employee while calculating payroll. 

3. Better resource allocation   

Workativ immediately informs managers when an employee applies for time off so that managers can allocate resources for tasks during that employees’ absence.

1. Increased efficiency because it's a virtual assistant that can handle complex conversations and tasks. 

2. Reduced time spent on routine tasks because the chatbot can help you with things you would normally do manually. 

3. Increased communication with colleagues and customers as the chatbot is able to understand natural language. 

4. Reduced risk of miscommunication as the chatbot is able to learn from past interactions and respond accordingly.

Workativ allows you to make an AI bot for your office in just a few minutes, without having to write any code. Workativ is a no-code SaaS platform that lets organisations create, automate, and deploy conversational AI chatbots in less than 60 minutes. Try our Gusto chatbot for FREE now. It's easy to use, and by automating tasks, it can save you time. So why not try it out right now?